Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.
We begin today with closing arguments set to begin this morning for The People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump. Hayes Brown of MSNBC looks at possibilities for the legal and political environment after a verdict is reached.
There are at least three likely options that await us on the other side of deliberations. Trump could be convicted of falsifying business documents to cover up hush money payments, made in the interest of affecting the 2016 presidential election’s outcome. The jury could conclude the prosecution didn’t make its case and fully acquit him. Or the jury could report that they’re deadlocked, causing Judge Juan Merchan to declare a mistrial.
Assuming there is a verdict, once the foreperson has announced the jury’s decision, any prior assumptions about the 2024 presidential race will need to be recalculated. Polls taken since Trump was first indicted have only been able to ask respondents to consider hypotheticals. A survey conducted in March by Politico Magazine and Ipsos found that a conviction could cost Trump just over a third of independents in the fall. Likewise, a February poll from NBC Newsshowed a conviction in the New York trial taking a major chunk of Trump’s support from independents and prompting a major swing from 18- to 34-year-olds to support President Joe Biden over Trump. And an ABC News/Ipsos survey conducted in late April found that 20% of Trump supporters polled would “either reconsider their support (16%) or withdraw it (4%)” if he’s convicted.We are now finally moving away from possibility to hard and fast reality, which may look very different than the predictions based on polling. And encouraging as those statistics may have been for Democrats, they still left unanswered some important questions. None of the polls above asked voters how an acquittal would affect their support for the former president, something that remains a possibility. Also, there’s no guarantee that the number of people who would change their vote would be enough to shift the election’s outcome in any given state...
Rachel Leingand of the Guardian takes a disturbing look at what Trump and his allies plan to do with large cities should the shoe salesman win the 2024 presidential election.
Trump has for years railed against cities, particularly those run by Democratic officials, as hotbeds for crime and moral decay. He called Atlanta a “record setting Murder and Violent Crime War Zone” last year, a similar claim he makes frequently about various cities.
His allies have an idea of how to capitalize on that agenda and make cities in Trump’s image, detailed in the conservative Project 2025: unleash new police forces on cities like Washington DC, withhold federal disaster and emergency grants unless they follow immigration policies like detaining undocumented immigrants and share sensitive data with the federal government for immigration enforcement purposes. [...]
Trump has posited creating new cities whole cloth as well, predicated on the idea that cities now are uninspiring at best.
Last year, he talked about building “freedom cities” on federal lands, though this idea hasn’t entered into his speeches lately, which have taken a darker turn. At the time, he said there should be a contest to charter 10 new cities using vacant, federally owned land. And he challenged local leaders to work with him to get rid of “ugly buildings”, make cities and towns more liveable and build new monuments to “our true American heroes”.
While there is no question that the Alitos flying of the American flag upside down at their home down is unethical (given that Justice Samuel Alito is a Supreme Court Justice), Louis Jacobson of Poynter asks whether the actions of the Alitos were illegal.
For the Alitos, the most relevant portion of U.S. Code is: “No disrespect should be shown to the flag of the United States of America. … The flag should never be displayed with the union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property.”
The notion of hanging a flag upside down to communicate distress has a long history in maritime culture, likely dating back to the British Isles in the 17th century, according to the North American Vexillological Association, an organization of flag scholars and enthusiasts. It was commonly used by ships through the 18th and 19th centuries until the development of more effective communication systems, notably radio.
By now, “neither the International Code of Signals nor U.S. inland rules of the road recognize the inverted ensign as a distress signal,” and “signal books published by the U.S. maritime agencies specifically discourage its use.” (Today, ships in dire distress are supposed to signal with “N” and “C” international code flags — which stand for “November” and “Charlie” — or other specified flags.)
As a result, an inverted flag “has largely become a political signal,” the association has written.
Paul Krugman of The New York Times looks at the effects of climate change on sewer systems as an example of climate change’s cascading effects.
...many American homes, especially in the Southeast, aren’t connected to sewer lines, and more and more septic tanks are overflowing, on a scale vastly greater than what I remember from my vaguely smelly hometown — which is both disgusting and a threat to public health.
The cause? Climate change. Along the Gulf and South Atlantic coasts, The Washington Post reported last week, “sea levels have risen at least six inches since 2010.” This may not sound like much, but it leads to rising groundwater and elevated risks of overflowing tanks.
The emerging sewage crisis is only one of many disasters we can expect as the planet continues to warm, and nowhere near the top of the list. But it seems to me to offer an especially graphic illustration of two points. First, the damage from climate change is likely to be more severe than even pessimists have tended to believe. Second, mitigation and adjustment — which are going to be necessary, because we’d still be headed for major effects of climate change even if we took immediate action to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions — will probably be far more difficult, as a political matter, than it should be.
Nicholas Dale Leal of El País in English writes about the continued growth of Latino evangelical churches and what that growth may mean politically.
While other religious denominations are losing members, the Latino evangelical churches are growing at a remarkable pace. It is a phenomenon that is going a little under the radar — religion in general is of less and less interest — but that, in a planned way, is changing the balance of religion’s immense power in the United States. It is also fragmenting the Latin electorate, traditionally closely aligned with Democrats: amid the rise of evangelism, these voters are becoming increasingly conservative.
...Between 2008 and 2022, the percentage of Latinos who identify as evangelical has remained stable at around 25%. In the rest of the groups, the figure has fallen, most notably among the white population, where it has dropped from 33% to 25%. The growth comes amid the demographic changes in the United States. In 2008, there were around 50 million Latinos in the United States, now there are around 65 million and by 2050 there will be almost 100 million. In other words, that 25% represents more people every day.
Furthermore, trends indicate that this 25% — which has remained stable over the last 15 years — is also increasing. Driving this growth are two specific groups: immigrants, 22% of whom identified as evangelical in 2008, a figure that rose to 32% by 2022; and second and third generation Latinos, where the percentage of evangelicals rose from 23% to 29% and from 27% to 31% respectively, in the same period.
Lee Drutman writes at his ”Undercurrent Events” Substack about the dangers of “nostalgic bias” and offers some suggestion on how to combat it.
Memory is a strange thing. We remember the past as better than it was. This is a well-documented cognitive bias called nostalgia bias. [...]
Nostalgia is a common response to uncertainty and unease. Citizens feeling uncertain and uneasy turn their minds to what they perceive as happier times, in the past. Politicians who promise to restore “the good old days” resonate with this nostalgia impulse. These politicians also emphasize the current decline and chaos. Change threatens some people. Under threatening change, some people seek refuge in nostalgia. [...]
In real life, the promise to restore national greatness is a frequent hallmark of fascism. In his 2004 book, the Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton defined fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”1
Fascism requires more than an obsession with decline. But it starts from this sense of decline. And the illusion of decline is real and persistent. For as far back as we have polling, polls consistently find widespread belief that morality, honesty, civility, and hard work were better in the past. A recent comprehensive academic analysis looks at 70 years of opinion polling across 60 countries and found that perception of moral decline was ubiquitous and constant.
Cat Zakrzewski, Joseph Menn, Naomi Nix, and Will Oremus of The Washington Post say that rather than debunking election misinformation and disinformation already online, officials in many different countries want to try “prebunking” misinformation.
Election officials and researchers from Arizona to Taiwan are adopting a radical playbook to stop falsehoods about voting before they spread online, amid fears that traditional strategies to battle misinformation are insufficient in a perilous year for democracies around the world.
Modeled after vaccines, these campaigns — dubbed “prebunking” — expose people to weakened doses of misinformation paired with explanations and are aimed at helping the public develop “mental antibodies” to recognize and fend off hoaxes in a heated election year.
In the run-up to next month’s European Union election, for example, Google and partner organizations are blanketing millions of voters with colorful cartoon ads on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram that teach common tactics used to propagate lies and rumors on social media or in email.
Paul Adams and Mike Murphy of BBC News say that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vows to continue to war in spite of international condemnation of the strike on Rafah that killed, to this point, 45 people, most of them civilians.
Israeli officials had spent much of Monday scrambling to find out what went wrong in Rafah. How did a “precision strike” using specialised munitions with “reduced warheads” result in a firestorm which killed dozens and injured scores?
Following last week’s ruling by the ICJ, ordering Israel to halt any operations in the Rafah area that might inflict further harm on the Palestinian population, Israel knows that the eyes of the world are on it. It is under enormous pressure to explain its actions.
It says the operation was based on intelligence, and it seems both Hamas figures were killed.
But the presence of huge numbers of civilians and, it seems, a significant quantity of flammable material, raises a great many questions about how this incident was planned and executed.
Hannah Roberts of POLITICO Europe reports that France’s National Rally party leader Marine Le Pen has proposed a coalition with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni to form a large far-right wing bloc in the European Parliament with the right’s expected gains in the European elections.
The far right is projected to perform well in the June 6-9 election but there are still intense doubts about which parties would be able to work together as cross-border political groups because many of the national parties are sharply divided, especially over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Le Pen’s pitch to Meloni is simple, and could well prove significant. Speaking to Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper on Sunday, she said: “This is the moment to unite, it would be truly useful. If we manage, we will become the second group of the European Parliament. I think that we should not let an opportunity like this pass us by.”
Meloni, who is also being courted by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to join forces with center-right European People’s Party, responded she was open to cooperation with any parties on the right.
Le Pen’s National Rally party currently sits with Identity and Democracy (ID) group, while Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party sits with the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR).
It is so tempting for me to make some sort of twisted sisters joke at that news…
Finally today, since we do sports here at APR...farewell to the legendary UCLA Bruin, Portland TrailBlazer, Boston Celtic, Pac-12 announcer, and Grateful Dead fan, and just all-around lovable wacky guy Mr. Bill Walton.
Rest In Peace, sir!
Have the best possible day everyone!
Chitown Kev May 28, 2024 at 12:00PM From Daily Kos
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